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Writing for Al-Karmil in 1997, Mahmoud Darwish explores the meaning of a “peace” that failed to dismantle checkpoints or to end the siege and occupation. In this text – originally published in an Arabic-language magazine founded by Darwish – he grapples with a question that is still relevant today: What does it mean for Palestinians to be told to accept as normal a reality that is entirely abnormal?
Sinan Antoon, a novelist, translator and scholar who won the National Translation Award for his translation of Darwish’s “In The Presence of Absence” in 2012, translated this essay exclusively for The Key.
You can read the original text in Arabic here.
I do not know. I do not exactly know what this approach to the place of the name, geographically, means. Because the ambiguity that overshadows the borders separating dualities: night and day, exile and homeland, and poetry and prose, is one of the densest and, at the same time, most transparent kinds of ambiguity.
Yet the advantage of this ambiguity, here and now, is that it can write a tame invective about the clarity of exile before asking if this transitional moment is one of rupture between exiting and entering.
Individuals, among us, will need special daily training to be gradually liberated from the weighty shadows of meaning, as these move from one epoch to another, and from comparisons that do not yield any benefits for our unsettled practical life. The dualities that inhabit us are not specific enough to define the object by its opposite: To be here does not mean I am no longer there. And not being here does not mean I am here.
